Search Engine, pos­sibly the best show on the CBC, is not on the CBC any more. It’s on TV Ontario.

First Search Engine became hugely pop­ular on the CBC radio. Then some­body decided that was a bad idea, so they cut back it’s resources and switched it to a weekly pod­cast and occa­sional con­tri­bu­tion to some other shows. So it became hugely pop­ular as a pod­cast, in fact the single most pop­ular CBC pod­cast, also ranking highly on itune’s list of all news pod­casts. So some­body decided that was a bad idea, so they cut it entirely. As of today.

In his final pod­cast install­ment Jesse Brown was as diplo­matic as usual, sug­gesting that the loss of the show was symp­to­matic of the overall loss of pro­gram­ming resources going on at the CBC. He sounded sin­cere. That’s nice, but the notion that the CBC doesn’t have the resources to keep up a forward-​​thinking weekly pod­cast when they keep pow­ering out daily multi-​​host time filler across the national radio tower net­work is ridicu­lous. Search Engine was an example of what the CBC could be, timely and engaged with it’s audi­ence, both reflec­tive and assertive in it’s reporting, and forth­right in taking on topics that were actu­ally impor­tant, not just those that fit within well-​​worn jour­nal­istic cat­e­gories. It was also doing it on a budget which I imagine was next-​​to-​​nothing and gen­er­ating huge lis­tener response. That response was pre­sum­ably par­tic­u­larly strong in the poten­tial next gen­er­a­tion of CBC core audi­ence. From a value-​​for-​​taxes per­spec­tive, it could hardly have much com­pe­ti­tion among existing CBC pro­gram­ming. With respect to Mr. Brown, that fact that Search Engine was cut sug­gests that someone at the CBC either doesn’t get it or does and doesn’t like it.

But! TV Ontario, the public sta­tion I grew up watching, has picked it up! Bi-​​weekly pod­casts starting within a couple of weeks (at this url, update your pod­catcher), going to weekly in September. Nice to know that someone in public jour­nalism does, in fact, get it. Nice to know that Jesse will con­tinue to help me get it.